Podthoughtshttp://www.maximumfun.org/tag/term/5/0
enPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: Talk to Me in Koreanhttp://www.maximumfun.org/2014/03/16/podthoughts-colin-marshall-talk-me-korean
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<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: lessons in the Korean language, Q&A segments, photographic vocabulary sets, explanations of how to say and how specifically not to say certain things, lessons on Korea’s many dialects, interviews, casual conversations, and even English-language discussions of Korean life<br>
Episode duration: 1-25m<br>
Frequency: weekly regular grammar lessons, with all that other material interspersed<br>
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매일 팟캐스트를 들어요. 매일 한국어를 공부 해요. 우연이 아니에요. 팟캐스트 듣기를 시작하기 직전에 한국영화 보기를 시작 했어요. 그때에 대학교를 이미 졸업한 상태이었는데 아직 대학도서관에 접근할 수 있었어요. 거기에서 무수히 많은 한국영화를 발견했어요. 사실은, 거기의 거의 모든 재미있는 영화가 한국영화였어요. 보면 볼 수록 한국문화에 관심이 많아졌어요. 결국에는 제가 한국어를 배울 수도 있겠다고 생각 했어요. 처음에 몇년 동안은 혼자 교과서로 공부했어요. 그리고 선현우와 최경은의 <a href="http://www.talktomeinkorean.com"><i>Talk to Me in Korean</i></a>이라는 팟캐 스트가 [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-to-me-in-korean/id351065142?mt=2">iTunes</a>] 나왔어요. 이제는 로스 앤젤레스의 한인타운에 살고, 한국어 수업을 듣고, 한식을 먹고, 한국책을 읽고, 한국텔레비전을 보고, 한국친구가 많고, 한국인 여자친구도 있고 한국에 이사가기로 했는데 아직도 현우 선생남하고 경은 선생님한테 배우고 있어요.<br>
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And the aforegoing paragraph, basic though it may sound to any native Korean speaker, should stand as some evidence of the abilities I’ve developed listening to this podcast. Not that they came immediately, or even quickly; <i>Talk to Me in Korean</i> launched in 2009, and I subscribed the next year. Since then, I’ve listened to every one of the over 250 <a href="http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/grammarlessons/">grammar lesson episodes</a> they’ve put out, at least three times each. I’ve even reached the point where I put in an hour or two per morning transcribing their <a href="http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/category/shows/iyagi-intermediate/">이야기</a>, or natural conversation episodes, to improve my listening and writing skills. I do still feel more than a little ashamed that my Korean, over six years after I began studying the language, sucks &mdash; but hey, before I picked up my <i>Talk to Me in Korean</i> habit, it blew chunks. Journey of a thousand miles, first step, etc. But why, you ask, would I take that first step at all?<br>
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The story I’ve long pawned off on bemused friends, involving a chance encounter with Korean film (and if you've never seen <a href="http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-films-of-sangsoo-hong">the films of Hong Sangsoo</a> yourself, do), begins this Podthought, but I don’t know that it adds up. “I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul,” as Calvin once said to Hobbes. Fourteen years ago, in the summer after ninth grade, I took a video-game programming class. “Don’t worry, guys,” said the instructor on day one, “I won’t expect you to learn to program in C in a week, just like I wouldn’t expect you to learn to speak Korean in a week.” <i>Korean?</i> I thought. <i>Why on Earth would I want to learn Korean?</i> It struck me as an example unsuitable in what I imagined as not only its punishing difficulty but its total irrelevance. (Ironically, I did have a girlfriend with a Korean mom at the time, which perhaps shows the seed already sown.) How did I get from that life to my current one, where I &mdash; as I said above, albeit in Korean &mdash; live in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, take Korean classes, eat Korean food, read Korean books, watch Korean television (had to get a second satellite dish installed for that), have many Korean friends, and plan to move with my Korean girlfriend to Korea itself? Some of it comes down to a tale of two countries, and interesting ones, in East Asia.<br>
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Like many Americans of my generation, I grew up fascinated by Japan, that cornucopia of movies, music, video games, animation &mdash; culture and technology of all kinds, really &mdash; that just seemed so much cooler (and seemingly so much less audience-insulting) than what my own country put out. But even then, the economic bubble that had turned Japan outward in the seventies and eighties had already burst. In the following years, Korea would come to engage with the wider world as Japan withdrew from it. I hasten to add that Japan remains a country of vast cultural wealth with much to recommend it, and one whose language I also pursue. But for a study of this contrast, we need only compare the most popular Japanese-learning podcasts with the most popular Korean-learning podcast, i.e. <i>Talk to Me in Korean</i>. Not only do the former not match the consistency, production value, and comprehensiveness of the latter, I don’t even think they have the same conceptions of consistency, production value, and comprehensiveness. Though in this framing a representative of Korea’s new era of cultural outreach, the show hardly comes as an official project of the Ministry of Language Promotion or whatever. It and the whole operation of videos, textbooks, and <a href=/"http://harukorean.com">sentence-correction services</a> that has grown around it began as the brainchild of that fellow 선현우, or <a href="http://hyunwoosun.com">Hyunwoo Sun</a>, mentioned earlier.<br>
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A voracious language-learner himself, Sun one day discovered &mdash; or so I gather from his interviews &mdash; the dearth of online resources available for those wanting to learn his native language. His initial response to this vacuum took the form of <i>Talk to Me in Korean</i>’s early episodes, where he and his teaching partner Kyeong-eun Choi, the 최경은 above, would go over various basic phrases, grammatical structures, and sample sentences. You probably know that format well if you’ve ever listened to a language podcast before, and the show’s core lessons retain it today. But now they find themselves sharing an RSS feed with an abundance that probably surprises Sun and Choi themselves: Q&A segments, photographic vocabulary sets, explanations of how to say and how specifically not to say certain things, lessons on Korea’s many dialects (for which watching so many EBS documentaries about the countryside has, I feel certain, only partially prepared me), interviews, casual conversations, and even English-language discussions of Korean life.<br>
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I see Sun (not to mention his now-many collaborators) as representing not just a new Korea eager to share itself with the wider world, but the autodidact’s equally new empowerment by way of the modern internet’s facilitation of teaching and learning. (It may not surprise you to hear that I’ve found no better medium for this than the podcast. Never underestimate the convenience the ability to study while on your bicycle.) Apart from a persistent tendency to say “let us” instead of “let’s,” he’s attained a truly astonishing level of English for never having spent serious time in an English-speaking country (Kyeong-eun speaks a slightly less advanced and therefore much cuter version), to say nothing of the Japanese, Spanish and French he also mentions speaking. He thus sets an inspiring example both as an unconventionally studying student and an unconventionally teaching teacher.<br>
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I don’t expect to get as proficient with Sun’s native tongue has he as with mine through only his podcast &mdash; hence my balanced daily diet of Korean reading, Korean writing, Korean viewing, Korean meetup groups, Korean language partners who correct my mistakes (고마워요, 미영 씨), upcoming trip to Korea, and upcoming life in Korea after that &mdash; but listening to it gives you a clear idea of what a small country like Korea, a new technology not quite yet taken seriously like podcasting, and an untraditional way of doing something as traditional as language teaching can accomplish. So why study Korean, anyway? The fact that a podcast like <i>Talk to Me in Korean</i> exists seems, at least to me, reason enough. Today, as I end my journey as a Podthinker, one that has gone on nearly as long as my continuing journey toward some kind of competence in the Korean language, I leave you with words I couldn’t say had I not taken it: 여러분, 읽어 주셔서 감사합니다. 인터넷하고 해외에서 뵈요.<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who hereby <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">officially retires</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men's style. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail, follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or like his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook page</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2014/03/16/podthoughts-colin-marshall-talk-me-korean#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsSun, 16 Mar 2014 22:20:35 +0000Colin Marshall33533 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: The Titanium Physicistshttp://www.maximumfun.org/2014/03/09/podthoughts-colin-marshall-titanium-physicists
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<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: topics in physics explained by physicists, to web comic artists and podcasters<br>
Episode duration: 30m-1h20m<br>
Frequency: one or two per month<br>
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The science podcast <a href="http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com"><i>The Titanium Physicists</i></a> [<a href=http://"feed://titaniumphysics.libsyn.com/rss">RSS</a>] [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-titanium-physicists-podcast/id483978280">iTunes</a>], it may not surprise you to hear, sometimes references the web comic <a href="http://xkcd.com"><i>xkcd</i></a>. The enterprises share not only a sensibility, catering to the now-proud “geek” culture, but, seemingly, a business model: <i>xkcd</i> creator Randall Monroe supposedly makes the lion’s share of his revenue by selling themed T-shirts, and <i>The Titanium Physicists</i> host Ben Tippett often pitches garments similarly branded in accordance with his own intellectual property. He comes right out and calls them “a little expensive” &mdash; <a href="http://www.printfection.com/GUTS/Fun-Shirts-for-Clever-People/_s_513196">$22.99 to $27.99</a>, turns out &mdash; but then underscores their durability. I may have a weak grasp on most if not all of the ideas of physics discussed on this show, but I do know a thing or two about higher-quality and thus pricier yet long-lived garments costing, in the long run, less than cheaper ones. Witness my essays on the matter for <a href=http://"http://putthison.com/tagged/colin-marshall">Put This On</a>.<br>
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Admittedly, I also don’t know who actually buys the T-shirts that keep all this internet content afloat, from web comics to podcasts to vlogs to MP3 albums to multi-user dungeons. I myself seldom have occasion to wear a T-shirt as my outermost, visible layer when not actually asleep, no matter how inflated my enthusiasm for the logo, joke, or URL emblazoned on its chest. Yet even now, thousands of human beings just like you and me order the T-shirts, and even hoodies, that subsidize the things we like to watch, read, and hear. I have similar questions about other supposedly popular wearables, such as Teva sandals: people buy them, obviously, but which people? Not that I claim total ignorance. We’ve all noticed that Tevas have achieved a strange prevalence in the science and engineering communities. In fact, I’d bet folding money that some <i>The Titanium Physicists</i>’ regular panelists &mdash; the Titanium Physicists themselves &mdash; have on Tevas even as they record. Don’t ask me how I know; at this point, I simply feel it in their voices. And that aside, I think even cold, hard Vegas odds would back me up, given the correlation between the percentage of a person’s life dedicated to the natural or applied sciences and the likelihood of that person’s wearing Tevas &mdash; or podcast- and web comic-branded T-shirts, for that matter.<br>
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I settle even deeper into my suspicion when I scroll through the <a href="http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/about-the-physicists/">roster</a> of Titanium Physicists, some 25 strong, whose bios include phrases like “works on relativistic astrophysics," “studies accretion disks around black holes,” “expert on superconductors,” “knew all the unix commands,” and “went to Princeton.” On each episode of the show, Tippett, who “does research on black holes and gravity and stuff,” summons a handful of them to Skype to talk about such advanced-sounding physics concepts as <a href="http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/2012/03/18/episode-11-of-matters-dark-with-kai-nagata/">dark matter</a>, the <a href="http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/2012/04/15/episode-13-that-which-lies-beneath-the-ice/">ice cube neutrino detector</a>, <a href="http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/2012/08/20/episode-21-things-fall-apart-with-dan-jankowski/">particle decay</a>, and <a href="http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/2013/06/24/episode-34-ladder-to-the-stars-with-mookie-terracciano/">Cepheid variables</a>. So we have here a sort of physics-centered <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2008/02/podthoughts-by-ian-brill-in-our-time.html"><i>In Our Time</i></a> (written up by my esteemed predecessor Ian Brill <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl">here</a>), though where that show always enjoys the reliable presence of Melvyn Bragg to ask the simple questions unapologetically, forcing his academic guests to break down their sometimes-esoteric subjects into publicly digestible chunks, this one has to look around for its equally necessary nonspecialists.<br>
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This <a href="http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/about-the-guests/">pack</a> of podcasters and web comic artists (and another occupation or two, if you can believe that) includes the one and only Dave Shumka, best known as Canadian comedian co-host of Maximum Fun’s own <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/stop-podcasting-yourself"><i>Stop Podcasting Yourself</i></a>. No accident, his professional comedian-ness; these non-physicist guest come not only to inquire about the very basics of particle acceleration and quantum cryptography and superfluids and such, but to crack a few jokes as they do so. Not that the Titanium Physicists don’t have senses of humor, but you know how sometimes, amid a group of scientists, you actually get more alienated, not less, when they start dropping punchlines? (Again, think <i>xkcd</i>.) Shumka’s Canadian-ness also lines up with the podcast’s apparent mission, or at least slight quality, of Canada-centricity; a fair few of the Physicists went to Canadian schools, some even to the University of British Columbia with Tippett himself.<br>
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This strikes me as all to the good, what with my personal inclination toward <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org">place-rooted projects</a> and fascination with things Canadian, though I wouldn’t want to overstate it, since the show does make serious use of Skype’s capacity to connect people based in all manner of geographically far-flung but physics-rich places. (Why, exactly, physics-rich places tend to get flung into obscure geographies no episode has yet revealed to me.) Yet I do come away from <i>The Titanium Physicists</i> with the impression of a more deeply Canadian quality retained. It brings to mind the only quote I know from Ernest Rutherford, the guy who seems to have invented nuclear physics: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” For all the outward modesty you’ll find in most of them &mdash; almost to the point of celebrating their supposed ignorance, not knowledge &mdash; I have a sense that many physicists, in their heart of hearts, believe themselves engaged in the sole truly productive human endeavor. By the same token, I wonder how many stereotypically meek, self-effacing Canadians, on some reflexive, unconscious level, hold the iron conviction of their country as the only one truly worth living in. But who among us dares dispute either of them?<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">one more Podthought to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men's style. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail, follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or like his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook page</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2014/03/09/podthoughts-colin-marshall-titanium-physicists#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 10 Mar 2014 06:26:51 +0000Colin Marshall33509 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: The Roth Showhttp://www.maximumfun.org/2014/02/23/podthoughts-colin-marshall-roth-show
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<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: David Lee Roth's “social-studies lectures by way of rock ‘n’ roll Babylon, at carnival-barker cadence”<br>
Episode duration: 20-50m<br>
Frequency: biweekly, with hiatuses<br>
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I found out about <a href=http://"http://www.davidleeroth.com"><i>The Roth Show</i></a> [<a href="http://www.therothshowrss.com/mp3episodes/">RSS</a>] [<a href=http://"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-roth-show-mp3-episodes/id591302128?mt=2">iTunes</a>] from an in-depth profile of its host, yes, former and current Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth. The article, Steve Kandell’s “<a href=http://"http://www.buzzfeed.com/stevekandell/david-lee-roth-will-not-go-quietly">David Lee Roth Will Not Go Quietly</a>”, appeared on Buzzfeed, of all places, but I didn’t judge, I just marveled. Specifically, I marveled at Kandell’s description of Roth’s lack of furniture and possession of “a rack of Japanese katana swords,” his successful completion of an EMT program in New York and tactical medicine training in Southern California, his 600-pound ex-sumo wrestler language mentor, his apartment in Tokyo, his lifestyle “rich and weird and singular and driven by very particular and exotic enthusiasms ranging from mountain climbing to martial arts to tending to gunshot victims in the Bronx.”<br>
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Needless to say, Kandell’s mention of a Roth-helmed “sprawling one-man video series and podcast that aspires to do nothing less than tell the history of modern culture through the eyes of someone who has been everywhere, done everything, met everyone, and hired a couple of midgets to be his security detail along the way” raised my eyebrow. “It’s nothing more or less than David Lee Roth speaking for a half hour on, more or less, a single topic. Tattoos. FM and underground radio. The history and semiotics of pop videos by way of Picasso. A long-ago trip to New Guinea. His personal history with drinking and smoking. Slideshows from an unending vacation. The episodes are monologues, history lessons, personal taxonomy, but really, mostly just talking and more talking, social-studies lectures by way of rock ‘n’ roll Babylon, at carnival-barker cadence.”<br>
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I quote so heavily from this profile not just because I couldn’t describe this podcast any better, but because I come from a different place than Kandell, who grew with a bed over which a Van Halen poster hung depicting Roth “frozen in an eternal mid-air split.” Having barely ever listened to Van Halen myself &mdash; as “eighties bands” go, farther askew Brit names like Wang Chung and the Human League have always dominated my playlists &mdash; I, on the other hand, didn’t have a voice to put to the voice, if you will. In listening to the seventeen currently available episodes of <i>The Roth Show</i>, I listened not to the pronouncements from on high of a rock star I once worshipped but to the stories of a man who has engaged in a great many fascinating pursuits, living a life from which only the consummately dense could fail to learn a few lessons.<br>
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It seems Roth himself now prefers notoriety for his high-octane joie de vivre than for his rock-god status, inside or outside Van Halen. Yes, he’ll talk on his podcast about “Jump”, but as a means of talking about the cinematic techniques employed in its much-imitated video, and even then as a means of talking about the various “languages” learned in the infinitude of human disciplines, from video production to ballistics to swordsmanship. Or maybe he’ll bring up the song in order to talk about a more recent remix he commissioned, hoping to give listeners as much of a Judas jolt as they got when Eddie Van Halen whipped out that synthesizer in the first place. He embraces the now, whether that means oscillating between his bases in New York, Pasadena, and Tokyo; seeking out only the finest inks to use in his agonizing, years-long traditional tattooing process; continuing his decades-long process toward kendo mastery; or attending two to three hours of Japanese-language school a day, all at an age, as he often puts it, “just south of sixty &mdash; in my generation, the new eighty.”<br>
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You’ll notice a certain tendency toward things Japanese in this account of Roth’s interests which, as much as anything else, pulled me into a podcast from the frontman of a band I haven’t followed. Roth has stories &mdash; my, does he &mdash; about how this happened, a process which had to do with his growing up in Southern California amid a large chunk of the Japanese diaspora for whose sensibilities he found himself developing a great respect. He often mentions the inspiration he drew from frequenting a number of other cultural, social, and artistic “neighborhoods,” usually black and Spanish-speaking, but when he talks about Japan on the show (which, of course, he sometimes does at home <i>from</i> Japan), he reveals a connection to that culture that resonates with a deeper drive in his own being: the drive to craft which, as manifest in Japan as well as in the world of David Lee Roth, has as much to do with creating as it has to do with endurance, humility, and near-obsessive focus. <i>Jiro Dreams of Sushi</i> has, I suppose, become the modern reference for this sort of thing.<br>
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We might say that Roth, whom few have presumably ever called either humble or focused, brings an unexpected touch of Jiroian intensity to the variety of his activities, from handling a blade to getting tattooed to learning languages to stopping bleeding to taking harrowingly extended trips to remote islands to warming up with thirty or forty renditions of the O’Jays’ “Love Train” to, indeed, performing “Jump” and jumping around an intricately designed stage as he does so. The deceptively advanced musicianship of Van Halen figures into the stories he tells, and his sense of craft feeds back into the storytelling itself. Kandell frames the project of <i>The Roth Show</i> as Roth “using his own war stories to educate a generation driven to complacency,” and, as energized a such a mission gets me, I assumed its hiatus last may would turn permanent. But lo and behold, Roth returned with the debut of his second season just this past Wednesday, the first chapter of a veritable multigenre rock opera build around the countless musical traditions that have influenced him since childhood. I’d fallen for the same emotional trap at the core of the Van Halen machine: they “create the aura that it may never happen,” as Roth puts it to Kandell. “Has this served us well? It’s served us superbly.”<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">two more Podthoughts to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on cities, aesthetics, Asia, and men's style. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail, follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or like his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook page</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2014/02/23/podthoughts-colin-marshall-roth-show#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsSun, 23 Feb 2014 21:31:38 +0000Colin Marshall33467 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: Dear HKhttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/12/22/podthoughts-colin-marshall-dear-hk
<center><img src="http://www.speakhk.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/dearHK-logo.jpg" width=300 height=300></center><br>
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<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: talk about Hong Kong, but mostly talk in Hong Kong, from two chatting 23-year-old friendst<br>
Episode duration: 30m-1h<br>
Frequency: weekly, but with gaps<br>
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I read quite a bit about Hong Kong, not because I have any business there, nor because my fascinations in Asia incline that way (I’ve invested more in Japan, and far more in Korea), but because the place has proven a rich object interest for some of my favorite writers. Dated as they may now seem, books like Jan Morris’ <i>Hong Kong</i> and Christopher Rand’s <i>Hongkong: The Island Between</i> have put in my head all manner of captivating images of an omnisensorially vibrant entrepôt, bustling beyond bustle, where East meets West with both a time-worn casualness and a constant hum of undissipating commercial energy. Then again, other favorite writers regard the place more guardedly; Pico Iyer’s description of “a dream of Manhattan, arising from the South China Sea” has gained traction with the tourism bureaus, but I also remember him calling the place what you’d get if Manhattan’s financial sector completely absorbed the cultural one. Hong Kong, then, perhaps falls under the category of places you just have to go see and judge for yourself, but until that day comes for me &mdash; sooner, surely, than later &mdash; I figure I’ll prepare myself with podcasts.<br>
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Hong Kong’s English-language podcasting industry, while hardy mature yet, has produced a handful of intriguing shows. <a href="http://dearhongkong.com/"><i>Dear HK</i></a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/hk/podcast/dear-hk-podcast/id661746289">iTunes</a>] in particular pitches itself by invoking “Stinky Tofu, Smokin' Tai-Tais, and a Smashing Harbour,” declaring a mission to “talk all things Hong Kong.” Having smelled (though not eaten) stinky tofu last summer at a night market here in Los Angeles, I decided to start downloading. I must have done so before reading the unfortunate second half of its blurb: “Join Charlotte and Felix in their weekly random ramblings!” Oh dear. To ultimately devolve into aimless, unstructured gab has by now become a standard podcast syndrome, but what to make of a show that out-and-out declares it as a form? Most discerning podcast listeners would, I imagine, preemptively chuck it onto that enormous and ever-growing heap of probable time-wasters, atop the shows by 23-year-olds, the shows made up of nothing more than a couple of friends chatting, the shows produced in a parent’s basement, and the shows whose hosts talk about nothing of greater consequence than whatever they happen to have watched or eaten lately.<br>
<br>
The content of <i>Dear HK</i>, to go into greater detail, comes out of the often movie- and food-related chatting of a couple of 23-year-old friends living with their parents. On the very surface, then, we have almost a parody of a classically unappealing podcast, a near-Platonic ideal of the form’s detritus, but for one striking factor: the Hong Kong thing. Even though its young hosts go so far as to call one episode “Random Ramblings”, and indeed even suggest it from the jump as a more truthful title for the show itself, how dull a listening experience could it possibly offer if they record it in as exotic a city/state/city-state/Special Administrative Region as Hong Kong? Felix Tsang and Charlotte Raybaud live in just such a place, and perhaps if I did too I wouldn’t pay much attention to their observations of, complaints about, and jokes on daily life, but I don’t, so I do. I feel, in fact, as if I’ve arrived on the brink of a theory about free-form podcasting as the most revealing gauge of a foreign land. Or maybe I could dial that in a little and say that those podcasters’ personalities provide that gauge: get to know the podcasters, as I’ve come know Tsang and Raybaud after listening to episode after episode, and you get to know their home.<br>
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And yet I experienced many moments, especially during <i>Dear HK</i>’s first few episodes, where, references to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR">MTR</a> aside, I’d forgotten the show had anything to do with Hong Kong at all, moments where the conversation turned toward fast food, zombie apocalypses, the latest <i>Iron Man</i> or James Bond or <i>Hobbit</i> movie, or the disorienting void of life after college, moments where Tsang and Raybaud might as well have been podcasting out of Van Nuys. This, needless to say, renders “exotic” inapplicable, though I suppose the place in which one lives, let alone the place in which one grows up, never really qualifies for that adjective. Still, listening to the hours and hours of these two voices coming from 7000 miles away, I can’t ignore one faintly troubling quality: they even sound American. This goes more for Tsang, who tends to refer to his female co-host as “dude,” than it does for Raybaud, whom I gather comes from a family divided between Britain and France. This grants her the sort of faint, drifting, context-dependent accent with which American girls hope to return after six weeks’ studying abroad in England.<br>
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But seeing as both modern Hong Kong and America emerged from British colonies, I guess I can’t begrudge the similarities between our podcasters’ manners of speech. Hell, I don’t know what I would have expected Hong Kongers to sound like, apart from the millions of Cantonese-speakers and the occasional Blimpian leftover. And you meet more than just Tsang and Raybaud on the show: they at some point decide to begin bringing on guests, putting themselves into conversation with a film critic (<a href="http://www.speakhk.com/dearhk/dearhk21/">part one</a>, <a href="http://www.speakhk.com/dearhk/dearhk22/">part two</a>), a <a href="http://dearhongkong.com/2013/06/16/episode-23-nightlife-journalism-guest-andrea-lo-from-hk-magazine/">nightlife reporter</a>, and an <a href="http://dearhongkong.com/2013/06/15/episode-9-secret-ingredient-guest-max-von-poelnitz/">entrepreneur</a> whose business has something to do with making it easier to prepare dinner. These two-on-one interviews have done the most to enlarge my own conception of Hong Kong, and I thus look forward to more of them, although Tsang and Raybaud seem to regard guestless episodes as the purest expression of their concept. I understand, given the rapport these two friends since school days display on their many episodes without a third party, but hear enough from them and the same curiosity sets in as when you’ve hung out with a new friend a few times: you want to see how they interact with other people.<br>
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Even without other people in the room, Tsang and Raybaud have endeared themselves to me, especially by the standard of early-twenties gab podcasters. Part of it has to do with the fact that they utterly without embarrassment have the conversations about Life, the Universe, and Everything &mdash; the state of the generation, positions on marriage and childrearing, anxiety about not having “accomplished anything great” by 23 &mdash; which we compulsively make fun of ourselves for having conducted back in our dorm rooms. (They even use the word “deep,” which in Asia may not yet have succummbed to the debilitating poison of American-style irony.) Good to know that they have just the same ones across the Pacific as well, and that the podcasting of place &mdash; place, in any medium so often providing a suitable nexus for a dense variety of subjects &mdash; can incorporate them. I’ve come to realize that we distance ourselves from those grand bull sessions not because we grow so much wiser, but because we’ve grow somehow weaker, stripped by time of our will to explore and reflect. Though a few years older than the hosts of <i>Dear HK</i>, I find I haven’t lost that will yet. I certainly still want to visit Hong Kong, which I now suspect would, framed correctly, offer today’s twentysomething Jan Morrises or Christopher Rands more than ever to write about.<br>
<br>
[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">four Podthoughts to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail, follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or like his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">brand new Facebook page</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/12/22/podthoughts-colin-marshall-dear-hk#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 23 Dec 2013 07:23:00 +0000Colin Marshall33322 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: You Can't Eat the Sunshinehttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/12/09/podthoughts-colin-marshall-you-cant-eat-sunshine
<center><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8512/8362068996_da83aa61d9_m.jpg"></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: comments on Los Angeles and the changes therein, followed by interviews with those tied to the region’s past<br>
Episode duration: 1h-1h30m<br>
Frequency: weekly<br>
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I’ve never taken a trip with <a href="http://esotouric.com/">Esotouric</a>, which offers “provocative and complex, but never dry” bus bus tours of greater Los Angeles which mix “crime and social history, rock and roll and architecture, literature and film, fine art and urban studies into a simmering stew of original research and startling observations” on such territories as “Hot Rods, Adobes, and Early Modernism,” “Haunts of a Dirty Old Man” (i.e. Charles Bukowski), and “Pasadena Confidential with Crimebo the Crime Clown.” Until such time as I cough up the sixty bucks to board an actual Esotouric bus, I’ll opted for the next best thing: <a href="http://esotouric.com/canteatsunshine"><i>You Can’t Eat the Sunshine</i></a> [<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/esotouric/canteatsunshine">RSS</a>] [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/you-cant-eat-sunshine-esotourics/id596209254">iTunes</a>], a weekly podcast hosted by the company’s proprietors, the husband-and-wife team of near-obsessive Los Angeles enthusiasts Kim Cooper and Richard Schave. Each episode opens with a local place-name-checking theme song by a ukulele-playing lady known as the Ukulady, who looks, as <a href="http://www.theukulady.com/">her site</a> reveals, exactly like she sounds, thus embodying a perfect union of form and substance. The podcast on which she plays enjoys a similar alignment between its own expansive form and that of the city/county/”mega-region”/half of the state of California it examines.<br>
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<i>You Can’t Eat the Sunshine</i> doesn’t make the obvious choice of offering audio versions of Esotouric tours, but it surely burns as much gas each time out with its actual mandate: to track down unusual people &mdash; poets, craftsmen, professors, impersonators of historical figures &mdash; living in Los Angeles and its environs, most of whom have strong ties to the place’s past, and interview them. On some episodes this just means going downtown; on others it means rolling to Long Beach, Eagle Rock, UCLA, Downey, La Mirada, or Lake Elsinore, the names of which wear me out in the typing alone. “We were born here,” announces Cooper in the 90-second back-and-forth spoken intro that precedes the Ukulady, and indeed, I’ve come to notice a certain divide between native Los Angeles appreciators and those transplanted. I fall into the latter group, having moved here for no better reason than that it fascinated me more than any other city in America &mdash; well, that and its robust revival cinema scene &mdash; and now my current projects include not just <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/">a book on the place</a> but <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">an interview podcast</a> more than half of whose episodes deal with Los Angeles. By all rights, I should have taken every available Esotouric journey already, if not up and launched a competing provocatively complex, research-and-observation-stewing bus tour company of my own.<br>
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One explanation, grounded in the nature of the place, almost provides itself: we live in such an incomprehensibly vast city that even the like-minded seldom encounter one another. Yet here, even the likest minds diverge on many points. The Ukulady sings, for instance, of “the long-lost neighborhood of Hermon between South Pas and Highland Park.” The idea of a long-lost neighborhood between South Pasadena and Highland Park may, even if you live there, hold out little immediate appeal, but Cooper and Schave see things differently. For seemingly every square mile in and just beyond greater Los Angeles, no matter how marginal, they know a story uniting the historical, political, social, and architectural layers that lay sometimes above but mostly beneath it. Admiring this skill, I’ve also tried to cultivate it by doing as much reading, writing, and talking about Los Angeles as possible. Many of books I’ve picked up and enjoyed in the process make much of the city’s sheer size, whether in celebration (<i>The Architecture of Four Ecologies</i> by Reyner Banham, from whom our hosts took college classes) or in a kind of nonplussed curiosity (<i>The Ultimate City</i> by the <i>New Yorker</i>’s Christopher Rand): Los Angeles itself already covers something like 500 square miles, so why not treat Malibu and Orange County as Los Angeles too &mdash; or even everything north to Santa Barbara and south to San Diego?<br>
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At that scale, decoding the urban palimpsest becomes to me, for whom traveling more than about twenty miles by land &mdash; least of all by bicycle, my default mode &mdash; tends to feel fundamentally unacceptable, an off-puttingly arduous task. Still, it sounds as if Cooper and Schave have dedicated their lives and careers to pursuing that, and (to use a favorite expression of Schave’s, with his deeply earnest interviewing persona) God bless ‘em for it. Their interest comes though with special impact in the “Closely Watched Trains” segment of the podcast, which happens somewhere after the Ukulady and the shared monologue, but before the interviews. Regularly clocking in at half an hour by itself, it finds our hosts running down the list of what has changed recently in greater Los Angeles, what seems about to change, what needs to change (usually back to some previous state), and what may or may not receive special protection from further change. Some of what they discuss strikes even me as inside baseball, these two having clearly visited city meetings and offices where angels fear to tread, but others have some familiarity. Let me take one example: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnie's_Coffee_Shop">Johnie’s Coffee Shop</a>. Every Angeleno knows Johnie’s, and most visitors to Los Angeles have at least passed it, as I do every few days on bike rides west on Wilshire from home in Koreatown.<br>
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There Johnie’s silently sits on the corner of Fairfax, totally non-operational as a coffee shop, and at best intermittently functional as the movie-shooting location it claims to offer. This may sound like a structure in immediate need of replacement with a skyscraper, but heed the words of midcentury “Googie” architectural historian Alan Hess, who says the 1955 building “tells us as much about that period in L.A. history as the bungalows of Pasadena told us about the 1900s or the missions told us about 19th century Southern California,” embodying “all of the changes in L.A.: becoming suburban, auto-oriented, also becoming a city of the future." He speaks for a surprising number who value this, just as do Cooper and Schave, who have made Johnie’s acquisition of landmark status a very closely watched train indeed. I myself have taken two minds about Johnie’s, just as I have about practically everything else in Los Angeles. Despite feeling enamored, like most everyone, with what the pure Googie aesthetic evokes, I’d really like to, y’know, eat something there. Even more so, I’d like to see a subway station there, the looming construction of which reportedly had preservationists sweating for a few minutes.<br>
<br>
Still, Cooper and Schave know too much to present themselves as either straight-up preservationists or (not that this counts as a word) redevelopmentists. Nor, even though they describe themselves as loving Los Angeles with a Banhamian “passion that goes beyond sense or reason,” do they come off as modern-day boosters. But their fascination itself functions as a valuable corrective to the kind of reflexively dismissive sentiment so often and so stultifyingly aired in Los Angeles’ direction. This doctrine regards any given one of the city’s assets as merely evidence of its deficiencies: its variety underscores its incoherence; its colorful history, a comparatively dull present; its recent proliferation of urban amenities, just how long it inexplicably did without the basic qualities of a city; and its great size, its great inconvenience. That last point actually still resonates with me, but then, I come from a different generation of Los Angeles obsessives &mdash; Johnies come lately, as it were &mdash; drawn by its new centripetal force, ever-increasing diversity and density, and weakening expectations of car and/or home ownership &mdash; but a generation that, perhaps for that reason, still has much to learn from a show like <i>You Can’t Eat the Sunshine</i>.<br>
<br>
[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">five Podthoughts to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail, follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or like his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">brand new Facebook page</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/12/09/podthoughts-colin-marshall-you-cant-eat-sunshine#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 09 Dec 2013 09:13:39 +0000Colin Marshall33285 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: Curious Cityhttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/11/11/podthoughts-colin-marshall-curious-city
<center><img src="http://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000046443934-ja5rb5-crop.jpg?3eddc42.jpg" width=300 height=300></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: questions about Chicago history, culture, and infrastructure, investigated<br>
Episode duration: 9-23m<br>
Frequency: weekly<br>
<br>
“Not so long ago Chicagoans were convinced that their city would soon be the greatest and most famous on Earth, outranking New York, London, and Paris, the centre of a new world, the boss city of the universe,” writes Jan Morris, our most astute observer of place, in a midcentury essay on the capital of the midwest. But now, “the blindest lover of Chicago would not claim for the place the status of a universal metropolis. Too much of the old grand assertiveness has been lost. Nobody pretends Chicago has overtaken New York; instead there is a provincial acceptance of inferiority, a resignation, coupled with a mild regret for the old days of brag and beef. For one reason or another, the stream of events generally passes Chicago by.” Chicagoans, a people still famously full of pride, may take issue with the passage quoted above, but they should note that Morris goes on to sing the praises of their city’s “magnificent art galleries,” “splendid libraries,” “plethora of universities,” “excellent symphony orchestra,” and so on. Why, just last night, I sat down to pizza with a couple of New York- and Los Angeles-loving urbanist friends just returned from the Windy City, both of whom had many strongly favorable impressions of its robustness, cleanliness, and comforting solidity to share. One of them even declared Chicago’s downtown his very favorite in the world.<br>
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Still, they laughed when I told the old joke about the discussion among Chicago’s founders: “Okay, we like New York; we like the crime, and we like the overcrowding. But consarn it, it’s not cold enough!” But our conversation, quite pro-Chicago overall, came at an advantageous time, for I’d spent the past few weeks listening to <a href="http://www.wbez.org/series/curious-city"><i>Curious City</i></a> [<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/CuriousCityPodcast">RSS</a>] [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/curious-city/id568409161">iTunes</a>], a newish podcast from well-regarded Chicago-based public radio station WBEZ. Each week, the show hits the street in search of answers to questions about the city’s history, culture, and infrastructure submitted by residents: “<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CuriousCityPodcast/~3/tEIciSpPNCI/are-there-tunnels-under-the">Are there tunnels under the Loop?</a>”, “<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CuriousCityPodcast/~3/8sm3tiAC9vg/what-chicago-aldermen-actually">What Do Aldermen Do?</a>”, “<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CuriousCityPodcast/~3/wEvtj6tQOAg/cleaning-the-bean-turning-left">How do they clean the Bean?</a>” These questions will no doubt make more sense to you &mdash; some sense, anyway &mdash; if you’ve lived or spent time in Chicago, but the show, seemingly aiming toward even a non-Chicagoan audience, usually takes pains to explain, in simple, outsider-friendly terms, even the most beloved local landmarks and institutions.<br>
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<i>Curious City</i> comes as one of the latest in a long line of contributions to the world of listenable entertainment from WBEZ, the cradle of such nationally high-profile broadcasts as <i>Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!</i> and <i>This American Life</i>. Though the latter remains nominally “from WBEZ, Chicago,” Ira Glass and company pulled up stakes and put them down in New York back in 2007, and don’t seem to have looked back. Most of my friends born or schooled in Chicago departed as soon as it made sense to do so, and have since shown far more attachment to the place in word than in deed. The <i>Onion</i> moved from New York to Chicago last year, a choice surely made for financial rather than comedic reasons. Still, the king of satirical newspapers, though in some sense weakened, has shown a sense of humor about it. I think of a line from the article “<a href=http://"http://www.theonion.com/articles/pretty-cute-watching-boston-residents-play-daily-g,31554/">Pretty Cute Watching Boston Residents Play Daily Game Of ‘Big City’</a>”: “‘I like it when they really get into their roles as residents of an actual city and complain about traffic and subways not coming on time,’ Chicago native James Camden said. [ … ] ‘I mean, we play Big City here in Chicago, too,’ he continued, ‘But we’re nowhere near as good at it as the people in Boston.’”<br>
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Just as it rings faintly odd to hear Boston brought up in conversation outside Boston, if you ever do hear it brought up, I can’t quite get over how <i>Curious City</i> talks so much about Chicago. I mean, sure, the show has taken on Chicago as its sole subject, fuels itself with questions about Chicago, and comes out of a radio station based in Chicago, but I do tend to wonder what reason they have to focus on all this beyond the fact that they happen to be there. (I often hear people in cities like New York or Los Angeles asked where they’ve come from and what brings them, whereas I often hear people in cities like Chicago asked what’s kept them.) Does the larger creative zeitgeist, in other words, lay out any more of a mandate to make a show about Chicago than it does to make a show about, say, Indianapolis? Yet I’d certainly also listen to a podcast about Indianapolis, perhaps with even more interest than I listen to this podcast about Chicago. And, as someone in thrall to <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org">an almost distracting fascination with all topics urban</a>, I listen to it with great interest indeed. Somehow the more regional and obscure the subject matter, the better: most of my favorite episodes investigate things like Chicago’s <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CuriousCityPodcast/~3/wJ-BOqL4M-s/the-chicago-accent-and-the">terribly off-putting native accent</a> or its <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CuriousCityPodcast/~3/lga4Oah6PXo/no-ketchup-flower-old">bizarre preferences about hot dog condiments</a>.<br>
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In <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/10/20/podthoughts-colin-marshall-follow-your-ears">my previous Podthought on <i>Follow Your Ears</i></a>, I named curiosity as “the one quality I can unambiguously call a virtue.” A show like <i>Curious City</i>, regardless of its location or its subject matter, further demonstrates this virtue. I’ve learned a great deal about Chicago since I began listening, though I began from an admittedly small knowledge base, much of it derived from <i>Ferris Bueller’s Day Off</i> and the stories of a Chicagoan friend who, weary of the routine muggings he endured on his commute home, moved to the suburbs of Seattle. In fact, the podcast has imbued me with my own curiosity about Chicago, one that drives me to ask a question from which, so far, it has shied away: how can such a high-profile city have such a low profile? Why, in Morris’ words, have its people, no matter how much of an interest they have about their home, “accepted their station in life, no longer swaggering through the years with the endearing braggadocio of their tradition?” This question may exceed the investigative scope of a ten-minute episode, but still, one wonders. Perhaps I’ll satisfy this curiosity by taking my own podcast to Chicago in the coming years. Not in the winter, though.<br>
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<br>
[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">six Podthoughts to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/11/11/podthoughts-colin-marshall-curious-city#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 11 Nov 2013 17:50:06 +0000Colin Marshall33233 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: Follow Your Earshttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/10/20/podthoughts-colin-marshall-follow-your-ears
<center><img src="http://www.followyourears.com/wp-content/uploads/cropped-earsstraightitunes.jpg" width=320 height=180></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: various segments, mostly interviews, on subjects like guns, cycles, rebels, and unemployment<br>
Episode duration: ~1h<br>
Frequency: monthly<br>
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Nearly a decade into the medium’s existence, quitting one’s first podcast and starting a second continues to produce intriguing results. It did for Caleb Bacon, whose <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/2011/12/18/podthoughts-colin-marshall-gentlemens-club"><i>The Gentlemen’s Club</i></a> gave way to <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/09/07/podthoughts-colin-marshall-man-school"><i>Man School</i></a>. I like to think it did for yours truly, whose <i>The Marketplace of Ideas</i> gave way <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a>. And it seems to have for Edward Champion, a man even earlier into the podcast game, first known for <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2008/08/podthoughts-by-colin-marshall-bat_03.html"><i>The Bat Segundo Show</i></a>. When he decided to put an end to that cultural interview program, he didn’t wait long to bounce back with <a href="http://www.followyourears.com/"><i>Follow Your Ears</i></a>, a podcast dealing not with individual guests, but with concepts: <a href="http://www.followyourears.com/guns-part-one-fye-1/">guns</a>, <a href="http://www.followyourears.com/cycles-fye-3/">cycles</a>, <a href="http://www.followyourears.com/aid-fye-4/">aid</a>, <a href="http://www.followyourears.com/rebels-fye-5/">rebels</a>, <a href="http://www.followyourears.com/bullies-fye-6/">bullies</a>, <a href="http://www.followyourears.com/unemployment-fye-7/">unemployment</a>. (I’d have done <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP5Xv7QqXiM">lawyers, then guns, then money</a>, but only out of personal preference.) Each of these episodes comprises not just an interview, but several different segments around the day’s theme. It reminded me, even when first I heard of it, of certain topical <i>This American Life</i> episodes, which appear whenever that show decides to ask questions about large-scale problems of war, politics, health, finance, what have you.<br>
<br>
Despite having always done a solid job with those sorts of topics, <i>This American Life</i> never struck me as fully suited to that territory. (I found myself tuning in least often &mdash; or tuning out most often &mdash; in the stretch when they might as well have titled the show <i>This American Foreign Policy</i>.) Perhaps <i>Follow Your Ears</i>, seemingly born out of such an investigative nature, might offer a less awkward integration of forum, if you will, and substance. But <i>This American Life</i> operates, as I’ve heard major public radio programs tend to, with a staff and an office and legitimacy and everything. From what I can tell, Champion runs <i>Follow Your Ears</i> pretty much the way he ran <i>Bat Segundo</i>, as a one-man show. A tall order indeed, but you’ve got to respect the willing acceptance of that challenge, especially in podcasting. If I had to name one consistent source of disappointment during this five-and-a-half-year-long-and-almost-over tour of Podthinking duty, I’d point my finger straight at podcasters’ tendency to avoid challenge: to talk to people they already know, to talk about things they already know about, to fall into forms already familiar &mdash; to hang their proverbial pictures wherever they happen find the nails.<br>
<br>
Champion may put together his shows on his own, but he also commands a variety of his own on-air personalities. (An “intellectual shock jock,” someone once called him.) This technique, judging by the iTunes reviews, became <i>Bat Segundo</i>’s most divisive element, especially when Champion assumed the role of the title lowlife for pre-interview comedy bits. As the host of <i>Follow Your Ears</i>, he does neither particular characters nor overt comedy, but we do hear him make a variety of relatively subtle shifts in persona: the hard-nosed reporter, the AM-radio pitchman, the theatrical storyteller, the wisecracking commentator, the earnest questioner. Time will tell if listeners have trouble digesting this as well; when some people open a can, they want to find exactly one thing inside, and exactly what the label promised. So what does the one on <i>Follow Your Ears</i>’ can promise? Curiosity, I suppose. “We encourage you to follow your ears,” Champion says at the end of each episode. “You never know what little nugget you might pick up. Curiosity is too essential to existence to ignore.” An adman diagnose this slogan as insufficiently catchy, but I certainly can’t argue with it. I always land on curiosity, in fact, as the one quality I can unambiguously call a virtue.<br>
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Doing an interview show myself, I tend to conceive of it as a virtue expressed primarily by asking the right questions, and I doubt Champion would disagree. The most interesting of those topical <i>This American Life</i> broadcasts, such as <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/391/more-is-less">those</a> <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/392/someone-elses-money">two</a> on why we’d heard so many high-profile stories on ever-rising medical costs, ask the right questions. But you’ll notice that, most of the time, the right questions don’t produce the “right” answers; that is to say, by their very nature, they seldom accommodate neat, simple, reassuring, or even fully explanatory responses. As I recall, those <i>This American Life</i>s on health care didn’t leave us with anyone in particular to blame about our insurance situation, just as, for instance, the <i>Follow Your Ears</i> on guns doesn’t pin the fact that people get killed with them on any one party. Oh, sure, the National Rifle Association comes in for a hard time &mdash; we hear a segment of Champion on the phone, after a lengthy hold period, with one of their hotline workers, the sole representative of the organization he could get ahold of &mdash; but I doubt they mind, having, for reasons explained in the podcast, actively assumed the position of political lightning rod. Champion asks how and why the NRA did that, and the question counts, to my mind, as one of the most fruitful. Others almost suggest themselves: given the enormous number of guns already extant and uncontrollable in America, why do we care so much about banning new ones? What counts as an “assault weapon”? And what if we all just fear finding out that gun control, even if completely implemented, may well not put an end to the killings?<br>
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Directly or indirectly, the expert interviewees, many of them authors of relevant books on the subject, address these questions. Most episodes of <i>Follow Your Ears</i> pursue their broader lines of inquiry with what feel like shorter-form <i>Bat Segundo</i>-style conversations. Some of them seem built around nearly full-length <i>Bat Segundo</i>-style conversations, as in “<a href="http://www.followyourears.com/bullies-fye-6/">Bullies</a>”, roughly half of which consists of a talk with the writer James Lasdun, who recently put out a memoir about his ongoing harrassment at the hands of a schizophrenic-sounding former student. In a similar proportion of “<a href="http://www.followyourears.com/cycles-fye-3/">Cycles</a>”, Champion speaks with famed Scottish mystery novelist Ian Rankin about the cyclical nature of his Inspector Rebus stories. That episode, which arrives at Rankin after segments on bicycles and a <i>Finnegans Wake</i> club and continues to segments on time-related data and those former kids who remade <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> suggests an especially promising (and thus especially challenging) way forward: episodes on more, er, purely conceptual concepts, the more seemingly abstract but ultimately concrete the better. Resonance. Obsession. Doppelgängers. Transposition. Androgyny. No podcaster of my acquaintance has yet attempted this, but I know of none better equipped to try.<br>
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(Oh, and <a href="http://www.edrants.com/segundo/"><i>Bat Segundo</i></a> itself has come back. You’ll know it if you subscribe to <i>Follow Your Ears</i>, since both shows share the same feed.)<br>
<br>
<br>
[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">seven Podthoughts to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/10/20/podthoughts-colin-marshall-follow-your-ears#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsSun, 20 Oct 2013 17:33:11 +0000Colin Marshall33189 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: By the Way, in Conversation with Jeff Garlinhttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/09/29/podthoughts-colin-marshall-way-conversation-jeff-garlin
<center><img src="http://24.media.tumblr.com/3035f9038b3d43bda4d3e4532ef680e9/tumblr_mk0l4pxo171r7itg8o1_400.jpg"></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: Jeff Garlin talking before a live audience with people he respects and/or people who interest him<br>
Episode duration: 1-2h<br>
Frequency: 2-3 per month<br>
<br>
I suppose we must live in the Age of Conversation. Podcasts gave me that impression, and podcasts &mdash; the ones I listen to, at least &mdash; have given me no reason to deny it. Despite having rejoiced at the seemingly limitless formal possibilities newly opened up by the medium, especially against the seemingly numberless limitations under which many radio programs still labor, I notice that my most memorable podcast listening experiences come from nothing more innovative than people talking to one another. Then again, the least memorable podcasts I’ve heard (to the extent, of course, that I can recall them) also featured nothing more than people talking to one another. Indeed, <i>most</i> podcasts, the enjoyable and the less so, need nothing more than a few microphones and enough people to speak into them. Out of this easiest of all configurations comes, it seems, podcasting’s both highest and lowest moments. Into this peaceable ring of extremity Jeff Garlin dares to throw his hat with his very own conversation podcast, <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/show/by-the-way-in-conversation-with-jeff-garlin/"><i>By the Way, in Conversation with Jeff Garlin</i></a> [<a href="http://rss.earwolf.com/by-the-way-in-conversation-with-jeff-garlin">RSS</a>] [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/by-way-in-conversation-jeff/id592632438?mt=2">iTunes</a>].<br>
<br>
We must here define a subgenre: within the bounds of the conversation podcast, we have the more specialized celebrity conversation podcast, in which a certain celebrity, presumably feeling they can hold, in their own personae, conversations of interest to audiences wider than those actually at their dinner parties, hold them and turn them into MP3 files. Sometimes this assumption works out; sometimes it doesn’t. Alec Baldwin’s <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/2012/11/17/podthoughts-colin-marshall-heres-thing"><i>Here’s the Thing</i></a> stands out in my mind as a particularly successful example of recent years, though he takes the strategy (with assistance from WNYC) of making the proceedings sound as public radio-y as possible. Conan O’Brien’s Charlie Rose homage <a href="http://teamcoco.com/serious"><i>Serious Jibber-Jabber</i></a> strikes me as ranking in a similar league, despite appearing only as videos, and sporadically at that. Garlin goes the route of maximum rawness, recording in front of a live audience at Los Angeles’ Largo &mdash; a place I tend inexplicably to conflate with Los Angeles’ Spago &mdash; and cutting out, apparently, only what absolutely needs currently out. But he has taken this on as a mission: a mission, he says, set against the highly produced, thoroughly pre-interviewed, rigorously edited interview programs so prevalent today. I can sign on to that.<br>
<br>
You probably know Garlin, as I do, from his role as Larry David’s agent on <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i>. You may also know him, as I do, from his current appearance on countless billboards and side-of-the-bus advertisements for a sitcom called <i>The Goldbergs</i>. I see these as I bike around, often past Largo, often listening to <i>By the Way</i>, a show on which Garlin admits that, despite starring in it, he’ll never watch <i>The Goldbergs</i>. That comes as only one of the confessions freely made, by interviewer and interviewee alike, on this podcast, which adheres, so I gather, to the principles on which he has built his stand-up act. Knowing Garlin, again, primarily from his role on <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i>, I hadn’t realized that he made his name in stand-up, but apparently he did, and on top of that, he did it with an act either mostly or wholly improvised. His podcast conversations. proceed on a similar absence of a planning. Some guests understand this immediately, while some, like <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/guest/mitchhurwitz/"><i>Arrested Development</i> creator Mitch Hurwitz</a>, take their time to do so, but Garlin manages to draw each and every one of them out in the end.<br>
<br>
<i>Arrested Development</i> fans will remember that Garlin did a stint on that show, which may have had something to do (whether he got the role from knowing Hurwitz or whether doing the role got him closer to Hurwitz, though a combination of both seems truest) with that particular choice of guest. And his position as a driving force of <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i> no doubt played a part in the arragement of <i>By the Way</i>’s debut episode: a rare conversation with none other than <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/larry-david/">Larry David</a>, who, so the episode reveals, has never in his life put a quarter into a jukebox, nor taken a photograph of any kind. This, as any dedicated podcast listener will by now have gathered, reveals the advantage of the celebrity conversation podcast: celebrities know other celebrities, and other celebrities whom interviewers less close to them couldn’t convince to sit down for a show, much less a podcast, much less an unedited podcast. For his second episode, Garlin interviews <i>Girls</i> creator and star <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/lena-dunham/">Lena Dunham</a>, whom he seemed to half-know through a few of the same circles and maintained an entertaining SMS-based relationship. One night he finally encountered into her at a party, so the story told on the podcast goes, and not much time passed before they found themselves seated at a ¾ angle across from one another at Largo.<br>
<br>
Garlin’s connectedness gets him in the podcasting room with a wide swath of people he admires, as he puts it, and people who simply interest him: <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/j-j-abrams/">J.J. Abrams</a>, <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/judd-apatow/">Judd Apatow</a>, <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/marc-maron/">Marc Maron</a>, <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/michael-moore/">Michael Moore</a>. The freeform nature of <i>By the Way</i> allows Moore to do about half an hour on why he thinks that O.J. Simpson might not have committed those murders, or at least why he thinks those murders may have had a less-than-sound investigation. While I didn’t come away completely convinced of his points, neither did I come away completely unconvinced of his points. But those looking for less politically charged interviews will find them in Garlin’s episode with former band frontmen like singer-songwriter <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/colin-hay/">Colin Hay</a>, who rode the Men at Work rocket up in the early eighties, or Black Flag’s onetime singer <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/henry-rollins/">Henry Rollins</a>, who has much more to say about travel, his water usage (our host’s opening question: “How do you shower?”), and the value of curiosity than his particular brand of activism. Garlin’s questioning itself illustrates the value of curiosity, call it self-indulgent though some may. Sure, you’ll hear him deliver several variations on the same stories &mdash; his manifold health problems, the loss of his virginity to a heckler in a lifeguard shack &mdash; but I defy you to find many more illuminating Conan O’Brien interview in recent memory than <a href="http://www.earwolf.com/episode/conan-obrien/">his</a>. Garlin calls O’Brien the funniest man he knows. But the funniest person? Amy Sedaris. I eagerly await their talk.<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">eight Podthoughts to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/09/29/podthoughts-colin-marshall-way-conversation-jeff-garlin#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 30 Sep 2013 06:33:24 +0000Colin Marshall33137 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: Man Schoolhttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/09/07/podthoughts-colin-marshall-man-school
<center><img src="http://manschoolshow.com/item/5106dc86e4b03481db282565?format=1500w" width=300 height=300></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: conversation’s about the man’s life with men who’ve lived it (including quite a few entertainers, comedians especially)<br>
Episode duration: 30m-1h<br>
Frequency: weekly, plus shorter supplements<br>
<br>
What, exactly, happened to my generation? We got off to a promising start, but at some point in the past few years took a hard look in the proverbial mirror and found our reflection badly wanting. This tidal wave of self-doubt causes problems of its own &mdash; most of our problems, perhaps &mdash; but no smoke comes without fire: have look at film and television, its Judd Apatow characters standing as unkempt, juvenile evidence of men so feckless they can no longer even romance women, its Lena Dunham characters not worth romancing in the first place, and tell me how much confidence we can possibly have left. For all our high-profile technological and cultural successes, many of us thirty-ish-year-olds feel dogged by something obscurely yet manifestly broken in our capacity to lead self-respectable lives. In America, some of this has to do with coming of age in an economy crippled by nostalgia for the postwar years and of inheriting a social contract between the sexes torn up long before we got here. Blaming such broad conditions, alas, just makes us lazier about rectifying our individual situations.<br>
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To vaguely gesture toward <i>Candide</i>, then, we must grow our own gardens. Maybe, just maybe, we can cultivate ourselves out of the reach of greater generational dissolution. How my distaff peers can manage this I haven’t had the time to learn, since I’ve had so much catching up of my own to do. Hearing <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/coyle-and-sharpe/glenn-obrien-how-be-man-interview-sound-young-america">Glenn O’Brien on <i>The Sound of Young America</i></a> and reading his book <i>How to Be a Man</i> helped. <a href="http://putthison.com/tagged/colin-marshall">Writing about other men’s style books for Put This On</a> has certainly done its part, but most of the knowledge there has come, of course, through the particular lens of clothes. Not that clothes make for a disadvantageous place to start; take one look at modern man’s hoodies, greying tube socks, and jeans with walked-on hems, and you’ll sense a serious underlying problem. (Modern woman puts on a far superior display of outward maturity, though in many cases a display with deliberate intent to conceal.) But now we Millennial males have one more broad-spectrum resource for our quest: <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/"><i>Man School</i></a>, a new podcast from Caleb Bacon, television writer and former host of <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/2011/12/18/podthoughts-colin-marshall-gentlemens-club"><i>The Gentlemen’s Club</i></a>.<br>
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I remember <i>The Gentlemen’s Club</i> as an interview show geared broadly toward the interests of men, or at least one particular concept of men that assumed boundless enthusiasm for comedians and porn stars. “The episodes I put out over the show's last eight months were sporadic and often uninspired,” Bacon writes in <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caleb-bacon/6-reasons-to-quit-your-podcast_b_2626326.html">a Huffington Post piece</a> on retiring his first podcast and launching his second. “The great thing was that once I made plans to end the show, my imagination opened up and an idea for a new show popped into my head. I realized I needed to produce a show that was about more than goofing around.” In a snarkier mood, I’d write a paragraph about how that important realization remains one thousands of podcasters have yet to make. Instead, I’ll share my own conversion experience: that is, my experience of converting my previous show, an intellectually wide-ranging in-depth public radio interview program <i>The Marketplace of Ideas</i>, into the geographically wide-ranging in-depth interview podcast <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a>. What at first felt like a loss necessitated by a move from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles and away from the station from which I’d broadcast became a gain in focus, connection (by getting out of the studio and into face-to-face settings), and incentive to explore travel (plus, through Kickstarter, ca$h money).<br>
<br>
Not to make this about me, but I did feel motivated to share my experience. The impulse comes from listening to <i>Man School</i>, a show that has everything to do with men sharing their experiences. Bacon sits down with what he calls “life experts” &mdash; always men, sometimes well-known men, and usually (but not always) men at least a few years older than himself &mdash; in search of the wisdom they’ve accumulated on their own journeys through maleness. So the pornstars have gone, but the comedians definitely remain: <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/blog/2013/3/6/class-6-violence">Mike Schmidt</a> on violence, <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/blog/2013/2/13/class-3-depression-with-paul-gilmartin">Paul Gilmartin</a> on depression, <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/blog/2013/7/31/27-becoming-a-dad-with-chris-mancini">Chris Mancini</a> on becoming a father. We also hear Bacon converse about the male experience with other figures, some already well known in podcasting: Adam Carolla associate <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/blog/2013/1/28/class-1-brain-cancer-at-age-30">“Bald Bryan” Bishop</a> on getting brain cancer at 30 (and, in a shorter <a href=http://manschoolshow.com/extra-credit/>“extra credit”</a> episode, on the tonsorial condition that gave him his nickname</a>), writer <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/blog/2013/6/12/class-20-my-midlife-crisis-with-paul-samuel-dolman">Paul Samuel Dolman</a> on the mid-life crisis that got him hitchhiking (and, at one point, picked up by Larry David), profesional poker player <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/blog/2013/8/21/class-30-the-poker-player-who-came-out-of-the-closet">Jason Somerville</a> on coming out of the closet, and <i>Pretty Good Pocast</i> co-host <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/blog/2013/2/20/class-4-i-thought-i-was-gay">Randy Wang</a> on coming out of the closet only to discover his straightness. If credibly virtuous “role models” stand thin on the ground these days, Bacon looks for the piece of role model within each of his guests, most all of whom readily admit &mdash; if not all but make a Christmas meal of &mdash; their imperfections and mistakes.<br>
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This holds especially true for the travelers Bacon brings on, or rather, for the men whose relevantly male trials and revelations happened to occur while traveling. They may grab my attention because the idea of the trav’lin’ man (as referenced, last I checked, in the theme song to Mike Siegel’s podcast <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/2011/09/19/podthoughts-colin-marshall-travel-tales"><i>Travel Tales</i></a>) remains, as have few other male types, properly leathery, reflective, and William Hurt-ish. Or maybe I think so because my own writing and podcasting interests have spent the past few years turning toward place, and from the world of trav’lin’ men I have thus drawn my real and virtual mentors. Finding mentorship wherever, whenever, and from whomever you can seems a central component of the <i>Man School</i> ethos, and an episode like, say <a href="http://manschoolshow.com/blog/2013/2/06/class-2-kidnapped-twice">Jordan Harbinger</a> on his survival of not one but two kidnappings, illustrates that. He and Bacon draw several useful lessons (applicable as well, I daresay, to the fairer sex) from these stories, the first a brief one from Mexico, the second a longer and more painful one from Serbia. Outside a show like this, I doubt any of us would have known to look to someone like Harbinger, a youngish former (seemingly halfhearted) lawyer and friend of Bacon’s, for lessons in manhood. Then again, he also runs a company called The Art of Charmthat teaches men to date more effectively and hosts a show called <i>The Pickup Podcast</i>. Could’ve made for quite a <i>Gentlemen’s Club</i> episode.<br>
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<br>
[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">nine Podthoughts to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/09/07/podthoughts-colin-marshall-man-school#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsSun, 08 Sep 2013 00:18:16 +0000Colin Marshall33085 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: On Beinghttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/08/25/podthoughts-colin-marshall-being
<center><img src="http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wvtf/files/201304/On%20Being%20Logo.jpg" width=300 height=300></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: interviews (and at best, unedited interviews) concerned with religion or systems of belief and/or perception more generally<br>
Episode duration: ~50m (produced shows) or up to 2h (unedited podcasts)<br>
Frequency: ~8-10 total per month<br>
<br>
I recall hearing years ago on <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/jordan-jesse-go"><i>Jordan, Jesse, Go!</i></a> how much Jordan enjoys listening to <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/"><i>On Being</i></a> [<a href="http://onbeing.org/podcast/podcast.xml">RSS</a>] [<a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=150892556">iTunes</a>] with Krista Tippett, which constituted endorsement enough to get me tuning in as well. I also recall hearing years ago on <i>Jordan, Jesse, Go!</i> that Jordan enjoys hearing discussions about the consistency, or lack thereof, of the fictional “universes” in which movies, television shows, books, and video games take place. Those Jordanian enthusiasms might seem to have nothing to do with one another, but the more <i>On Being</i> I hear, the less they strike me as unrelated. Formerly known as <i>Speaking of Faith</i>, the show aims to “<a href="http://www.onbeing.org/about">draw out the intellectual and spiritual content of religion that should nourish our common life</a>” &mdash; or, as I think of it, to talk as clearly and non-judgmentally as possible about religions, broadly defined. Most shows about religion, I would think, come the perspective of the One True Faith &mdash; whichever of the One True Faiths to which its creators happen to subscribe &mdash; and therefore must reject outright the term “religion” in the plural. <i>On Being</i>, should it need a third title, might as well call itself <i>Religions, Plural</i>.<br>
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No one comes off as a believer in religions, plural as much as Tippett herself. She doesn’t sound like she actually <i>follows</i> all religions, or even several of them &mdash; she identifies, I gather, as some type of Christian &mdash; and indeed, the incompatibilities of their tenets would make that quite a difficult life. But you might say that the believes in their compatibilities, to the extent those exist. Or she believes in the potential for such compatibilities. To go back to the show’s about page, she operates on the premise that “there are basic questions of meaning that pertain to the entire human experience,” and often conducts interviews with religious or religion-oriented guests in pursuit of those questions. Tippett’s conversations thus make for valuable resources when you need to understand “the deal” with a certain faith: Brigham Young University professor Robert Millet on <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/inside-mormon-faith/112">Mormonism</a>, rabbi David Hartman (recorded in Israel, no less) on <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/opening-windows/16">Judaism</a>; nine different Muslims on <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/living-islam/126">Islam</a>. If you like this kind of thing, make sure you don’t miss Tippett’s <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/pursuing-happiness-dalai-lama/147">live conversation</a> with not only a Muslim scholar, and not only a chief chief rabbi, and not only a presiding bishop, but the Dalai Lama too.<br>
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I suppose we can approach this side of <i>On Being</i> &mdash; a side dominant in the <i>Speaking of Faith</i> days &mdash; as we approach the Indiana Jones movies. If you consider all four pictures together, they constitute a fictional reality &mdash; a “universe,” if you will &mdash; where not only does the Ark of the Covenant exist, filled with ghosts, but magic-using, human-sacrificing Indian cults exist, Jesus’ immortality-granting Holy Grail exists, and ancient space aliens exist. While many fans take an interest in each of Indiana Jones’ adventures, it must give even the most obsessively devoted a headache to get them all logically aligned. The same must hold for humanity’s countless belief systems, and Tippett avoids these headaches by taking each one on its own terms, just like sane Indiana Jones fans must take <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i>, <i>The Temple of Doom</i>, <i>The Last Crusade</i>, and <i>Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</i> (assuming, fridge-nuking and all, that they even acknowledge its existence) on their own terms. Tippett asks not, to continue this analogy, whether the Indiana Jones movies stay consistent with reality; she asks what human need watching Indiana Jones movies fulfills in the first place.<br>
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Still, arguments about Indiana Jones remain, by their very nature, contained; nobody loses their lives over them, and no wars erupt in their name. We can hardly say the same of arguments about religion. Some claim occasionally &mdash; and some claim daily, at least on my Facebook feed &mdash; that anybody talking about religion, any religion, even those deigning to discredit them, do humanity a disservice. And they have a point, if you go by certain major faiths’ tendencies toward social control and cavalier attitudes toward the truth. Listening to discussions of religion from <i>On Being</i> and other venues, I do wonder if the mere fact that someone, somewhere believes in something makes that thing worthy of attention, let alone consideration. But then I remember to frame a more interesting question: not about what people believe, and not about why they believe it, but about what aspect of their lives needs it to be true. The show’s intellectual broadening over recent years suits just this frame of mind by having more conversations that, as I say, take the concept of “religions” broadly, not just as systems of belief, but as, perhaps, systems of perception. This allows guests that may not have fit into the earlier mandate: I point you to <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/seth-godin-on-the-art-of-noticing-and-then-creating/5000">Tippett’s interview with Seth Godin</a>, a figure best known for writing forward-thinking books on marketing, but whom our host gets talking about “the art of noticing.”<br>
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Specifically, I point you to <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/seth-godin-on-the-art-of-noticing-and-then-creating/5000/extraaudio">Tippett’s unedited interview with Seth Godin</a>. Extending itself into the age of podcasting, <i>On Being</i> now offers Tippett’s interviews as recorded straight off the board, from the moment her engineer in St. Paul links up with the guest’s studio, working out the connection hitches and elusive echoes, right up until the time comes for her to tell the guest thanks, we’ll may have more questions, we’ll let you know when this should air. You can still download the produced broadcasts, which cut together segments of talking with music, sounds, and radio-y “resets,” but I daresay the unedited podcasts, which often run well over an hour, render them superfluous. Tippett prepares herself to hold actual human conversations &mdash; a rare willingness, believe you me &mdash; and she tends to do so with interlocutors who can rise to the challenge. Combine this with the way her program has now managed to increase its generality while maintaining more or less an appearance of specificity &mdash; a move I always admire &mdash; and you get, at least in the conversations that have kept me most rapt &mdash; Godin, philosopher <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/sidling-difference/175">Kwame Anthony Appiah</a> on difference, writer <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/alain-de-botton-school-life-atheists/4821">Alain de Botton</a> on adapting religion for atheists &mdash; two humans connecting about connection itself.<br>
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<br>
[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b>, who has <a href="http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10065">ten Podthoughts to go before retirement</a>, also hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/08/25/podthoughts-colin-marshall-being#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 26 Aug 2013 01:36:37 +0000Colin Marshall33063 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: The Faroe Islands Podcasthttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/08/12/podthoughts-colin-marshall-faroe-islands-podcast
<center><img src="http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/f/fo.gif"></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: interviews with the movers and shakers of an archipelago you probably haven’t heard of<br>
Episode duration: 15-45m<br>
Frequency: 2-5 per month<br>
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When I first heard of <a href="http://faroepodcast.blogspot.com/"><i>The Faroe Islands Podcast</i></a> [<a href="http://faroepodcast.libsyn.com/rss">RSS</a>] [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=303476954">iTunes</a>], I heard it as a sort of punchline. “Oh man, this archipelago off of Europe? That only has 50,000 people? The Faroe Islands? There’s <i>an entire podcast</i> about it.” But really, how far does this separate it from so many other podcasts? This show covers all aspects of life on the Faroe Islands, and going by its episodes on <a href="http://faroepodcast.blogspot.com/2009/07/faroese-tv.html">Faroese broadcasting</a>, any media pertaining to the place manages near-automatically to draw the attention of a sizable chunk of the population. A reasonably successful podcast about, say, one particular <i>Doctor Who</i> Doctor might attract five or ten thousand listeners. But a Faroe Islands news broadcast pulls in an astonishing <i>fifty percent</i> of the viewership. More than a few of those 25,000 &mdash; or of the English-speaking fraction of that 25,000, anyway &mdash; would, I wager, want to take a listen to <i>The Faroe Islands Podcast</i>, a production about a niche country in a niche-friendly medium, even if only out of curiosity.<br>
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This narrow focus has another advantage. Listening the show’s 182-and-counting episodes, I kept thinking back to, of all books, Robert Pirsig’s <i>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</i>. In it, Pirsig relates a story from his alter ego Phaedrus’ teaching days at Montana State College. One of his students wants to write “a 500-word essay on America” but can think of nothing to say. When Phaedrus suggests she write about just the city of Bozeman instead, she still comes back empty-handed. He then tells her to write just about Bozeman’s main street, but she again comes back without a paper. He finally suggests she write only about the front of Bozeman’s opera house, beginning with its upper-leftmost brick. Lo and behold: <blockquote>She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana.<br>
<br>
[ … ]<br>
<br>
She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.</blockquote>In this way, <i>The Faroe Islands Podcast</i> runs on a consistent volume of steam in a way that <i>The America Podcast</i> might not. While it might at first seem unambitious to podcast about the goings-on of such a tiny country, it ultimately presents a greater challenge than podcasting about the goings-on of a large one. Or at least it presents a greater disincentive to laziness: the folks behind <i>The Faroe Islands Podcast</i> have to constantly seek out interviews, stories, and field recordings, whereas those who would make <i>The America Podcast</i> could simply dump their "analysis" atop a handful of <i>New York Times</i> articles and call it an episode.<br>
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To put the bar even higher, host Matthew Workman doesn't actually live in the Faroes. When he began the podcast, he'd never even visited them. According to his <a href="https://twitter.com/matthewworkman">Twitter profile</a>, he now resides in Portland, Oregon, a city that, with its population of 580,000, seems sedate when you've come from one of the United States' majors, but one that must feel like Tokyo when you've come from the Faroes, whether from its villages or its difficult-to-pronounce capital city. But when he first became aware of the Faroes, Workman lived in the smaller Oregonian town of Medford, where his increasingly Faroe-centric blogging caught the eye of the local media. "He's Never Been There..." announces the headline of <a href="http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090118/NEWS/901180330">a 2009 <i>Medford Mail Tribune</i> article</a>, "But He'll Tell You All About It.” Though the piece mentions the imminent launch of <i>The Faroe Islands Podcast</i>, it mostly covers the origin of the blog from which it sprang, which “fits right in the Faroese tourism board's mission to bring greater awareness about the country and its offerings.”<br>
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The Faroes, so I gather from the podcast, have recently come up in the world. Running on a fishing economy seemingly since its first inhabitation and essentially disconnected from international media since the nineties, the country has in this century set about building itself a profile. In that it faces a host of challenges, not least the fact that much of its initial appeal lies in its very obscurity. It happened that way for Workman himself, who plunged down the Faroe hole because he hadn’t heard of the place before, which he describes as “a big deal for me because I’m a huge map nerd.” My own minor cartographical fixation had never led me to discover the Faroes either, though at world-map scale they barely reveal themselves to the naked eye. Unified with Norway in 1035, ceded to Denmark in 1814, and only granted home rule in 1948, the Faroes have also no doubt endured a few identity issues. Yet as Workman’s mostly Skype-based interviews with Faroese and Faroes-based expats reveal, the place has held fast, culturally: they’ve retained their own language, their own door-locking habits (they don’t), their own TV station. And boy, do they have their own scenery.<br>
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<i>The Faroe Islands Podcast</i>’s guests make much of the striking panorama of sea and sky which surrounds the Faroes, not to mention the clusters of hyper-quaint Nordic architecture at the center of it all, but words inevitably fail them. Then again, podcasting has few strengths as a visual medium; you get a clearer idea of the islands’ aesthetic from the field recordings collected by the show’s Faroes-based producer. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/faroeislands/">Snapshots</a>, and visitors take many, give you an idea of what caliber of beauty to expect, but as the desginer Tibor Kalman said, “I have no problem with beauty, but it isn't very interesting.” Yet I get the sense that a visit to the Faroes makes you realize what my visit to the New Zealand’s south island made me realize: some kinds of beauty, especially when presented in unreal remoteness, only turn interesting when physically experienced. This Workman discovered recording the stretch of episodes when, at long last, he goes to the Faroe Islands himself. Even if the country wouldn’t suit your own tastes &mdash; I once lived in the similarly picturesque Santa Barbara, population 90,893, but had to move when I just couldn’t take the smallness anymore, so it probably wouldn’t suit mine &mdash; but that doesn’t change the show’s fascination: that is to say, Workman’s own, with such a little-known part of the world. Behold all the original and direct seeing (and hearing) such a fascination can generate, from such an old and long-isolated setting, with modern tools of connection.<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b> hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]
http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/08/12/podthoughts-colin-marshall-faroe-islands-podcast#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 12 Aug 2013 19:46:03 +0000Colin Marshall33034 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: The Adam and Dr. Drew Showhttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/07/14/podthoughts-colin-marshall-adam-and-dr-drew-show
<center><img src="http://www.launchpaddigitalmedia.com/images/podcast/300x300/adamanddrdrew.jpg" width=300 height=300></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: golden-age <i>Loveline</i>, more or less, but with fewer calls and more discussions of the breakdown of society<br>
Episode duration: 45m-1h10m<br>
Frequency: 8-9 per month<br>
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Mention this though I often do when writing about things Adam Carolla-related, I tuned in to <i>Loveline</i> throughout my adolescence with a near-religious dedication. Those nightly two hours with Carolla and “Dr. Drew Pinsky” on sex, drugs, medicine, home improvement, auto repair, and the state of the republic had formative effects I can’t possibly overstate. (They even taught me, broadcasting out of their decrepit Culver City studio, quite a bit about the geography of Los Angeles that would come in handy when I landed here myself.) Though ostensibly an advice show, and one that did sometimes spend a solid hour taking calls from stoned fifteen-year-old snowboarders worried about herpes, <i>Loveline</i> produced its most memorable gems of wisdom &mdash; not just about pills or booze or dental dams or plywood, but about life itself &mdash; with nobody on the phone, and nobody in the studio (certainly not from the gallery of “drunken rockers and stupid actresses,” as Carolla has since described the guest list) but its co-hosts. They admitted that they didn’t do the show for the callers, who half the time wouldn’t even pretend to accept their counsel, but the listeners. As one of those listeners, I can vouch for the benefits.<br>
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Like any nightly live show, especially one hosted by fellows busy even by celebrity standards, <i>Loveline</i> weathered the occasional absence: another doctor sitting in for Drew, another comedian for Adam. This taught us that, while either individual could hold their own, we tuned in for the combination, the pairing, the duo &mdash; the sum greater than the parts. The inquisitive, education-loving, clinically-minded, mild if sometimes twitchy Dr. Drew’s yin balanced the education-free, down-and-dirty/nuts-and-bolts, outwardly base but secretly incisive Adam’s everyman yang, making 1995 through 2005, the years between Carolla’s hiring as a co-host and his departure to helm a morning show on KLSX, the program’s near-official golden age. (Pinsky’s presence goes back to the early eighties, and continues to this day, alongside that of someone named Psycho Mike.) Apart from occasional guest appearances by Carolla on <i>Loveline</i> or Pinsky on Carolla’s radio show and, later, <a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2009/04/podthoughts-by-colin-marshall-adam.html">flagship podcast</a>, 2005 through most of 2012, constituted lean years indeed for we who consider ourselves appreciators of Adam and appreciators of Dr. Drew, but out-and-out fans of Adam <i>and</i> Dr. Drew.<br>
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But then Carolla grew his podcast network, giving rise to the opportunity to replicate the old formula with <a href="http://adamcarolla.com/adamanddrew/"><i>The Adam and Dr. Drew Show</i></a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-adam-and-drew-show/id584543823?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D2">iTunes</a>] [<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheAdamAndDrewShow">RSS</a>]. Put on Carolla and Pinsky’s new podcast for just a few minutes, and your subconscious mind may well revert to its old <i>Loveline</i> listening patterns, so faithfully has it retained the format. The most obvious differences come from no longer laboring under commercial radio’s layers of infrastructure and management: nobody tells them they have to take a commercial break, nobody tells them they have to take calls, nobody tells them they have sit down with the guys from Oasis. They still do bring guests on once in a while, but only those they really want to talk to: a <a href="http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/adamanddrew/030AdamDrewShow.mp3">Jim Jeffries</a>, a <a href="http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/adamanddrew/046AdamDrewShow.mp3">Jimmy Pardo</a>, a <a href="http://traffic.libsyn.com/adamanddrew/015AdamDrewShow.mp3">David Alan Grier</a> (or maybe <a href="http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/adamanddrew/051AdamDrewShow.mp3">Carolla’s kids</a>). And they still take calls, though doing so has fallen to an even lower priority than it had in their days at what Carolla called Westwood None. But podcasting grants them the freedom to spend more time doing, at least to my mind, what they did best on <i>Loveline</i>: noticing something they find especially surprising, nonsensical or bothersome, then spinning it out into a much larger discussion about humanity: human foibles, human society, human nature. In the grains of sand they find working in entertainment, in medicine, and through everyday life, they see our world.<br>
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And what they see in our world, they don’t much like. Carolla has long traded on his proclivity for unhesitant and unrepentant fault-finding &mdash; “What Can’t Adam Complain About?” has become a semi-regular feature on his various shows over the years &mdash; but these days his talks with Pinsky almost immediately turn into detailed breakdowns of what ails America. This theme, the increasing doggedness with which they pursue it, and the tone of aggrieved lament that sometimes sets in, has, I sense, put off more than a few longtime fans. They may go so far as to dump good old Adam and Dr. Drew, now almost twenty years older and seemingly quite wealthier (though Carolla started from zero) than at the dawn of that <i>Loveline</i>’s golden age, into the “out-of-touch middle-aged white guys” box. I suppose it doesn’t help that, in the past decade, several prominent media figures who sing for their supper to the conservative crowd have treated Carolla as a fellow traveler, or at least as a crossover point. I have, at moments, thought of him as conservative, but only when I haven’t actually listened to him in a while.<br>
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Carolla has, I believe, called himself a libertarian, but neither does that label represent the contents of the jar; he may do endless variations on the a standard set of themes, but he doesn’t do them on the standard set of <i>libertarian</i> themes. The objections to Carolla, and to a lesser extent Carolla in dialogue with Pinsky, have less to do with their politics, I would submit, and more to do with our tendency to frame everything in political terms. The show’s conversations begin with complaints about passionfruit, ketchup packet design, energy drinks, participation trophies, the strange proliferation of service dogs, and they may well touch on public policy along the way, but they all wind up at the same destination: the grand slackening of America, the hemorrhaging from all our men, women, children, and institutions the quality they on <a href="http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/adamanddrew/043AdamDrewShow.mp3">one episode</a> term “grit.” It goes back, in the context of <i>The Adam and Dr. Drew Show</i>, to the <a href="http://traffic.libsyn.com/adamanddrew/001AdamDrewShow.mp3">premiere</a>, wherein Carolla brings up a banner he spotted at a high school: “Do the impossible: graduate.” Out of this morsel he makes a Christmas dinner of societal indictment, a j’accuse aimed at America’s pathetically withered expectations and the awesome bulk of its sloth.<br>
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As an entertainer, Carolla knows how to push his points as far as they can go. Pinsky, who still dutifully tempers this impulse with a well-placed nuance here and there, now also contributes a few criticisms of his own. (Having recently read <i>Democracy in America</i>, he occasionally cites Tocqueville in so doing.) We should note that Carolla himself spent decades never having technically graduated high school himself, and that both he and Pinsky display what some might consider a freakish compulsion to work as hard as possible, all the time, putting them at a vantage from which almost everyone (“except Richard Branson and Madonna,” Carolla has noted) must look lazy. Still, they both came of age in the seventies, this country’s last sustained period of fecklessness, reality denial, and gruesome footwear. They clearly fear that, in some sense, that time will return. I never lived through the seventies and have no inclination toward complaint, but I admit that Adam and Dr. Drew have got me a little afraid too. Despite having little faith in grand solutions, at least whenever I start to feel myself slacken, I can usually trust them to snap me, as a 28-year-old with an iPod just as they did to 13-year-old me with a radio, back into action.<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b> hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/07/14/podthoughts-colin-marshall-adam-and-dr-drew-show#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsSun, 14 Jul 2013 23:28:52 +0000Colin Marshall32978 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: Lexicon Valleyhttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/06/30/podthoughts-colin-marshall-lexicon-valley
<center><img src="https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1808418258/600x600_PodCastArt_LexiconValley.jpg" width=300 height=300></center><br>
<br>
<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: a “podcast about language, from pet peeves, syntax, and etymology to neurolinguistics and the death of languages”<br>
Episode duration: 25-30m<br>
Frequency: 1-2 per month, with gaps<br>
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I grew up with a reputation as a “smart kid.” Given your presence here, maybe you did too. If so, I do hope you handled it better than I did. Po Bronson explained a large part of my own burden in <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/">a <i>New York Times Magazine</i></a> article a few years ago: hearing myself called smart, I set about protecting the image by avoiding any task, intellectual or otherwise, at which I might not easily succeed, a condition that persisted into my twenties. Worse, I gained this aura of intelligence to some extent illegitimately, by learning to read early and from then on cargo-cultishly employing whichever words and phrases I thought might impress adults. So I spent my childhood ever more fearfully performing what amounted to smoke-and-mirrors act, but at least it kept me off drugs. It also taught me about the power of language, and, ultimately, the importance of using that power productively. One example of unproductive use: compulsively correcting grammar and usage aloud.<br>
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Most kids lead such boring lives here in America that, if we’ve received the mixed blessing of stronger-than-usual verbal ability, we can’t resist passing the time by ridiculing mismatched tenses, split infinitives, and even grocer’s apostrophes. We become what, in <a href="http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html">his review of Bryan Garner’s <i>A Dictionary of Modern American Usage</i></a>, David Foster Wallace memorably called SNOOTs, “just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd,” “the sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE — 10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear <i>dialogue</i> used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of <i>suppurate</i>.” SNOOTs and only SNOOTs, you might assume, make up the audience for <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html"><i>Lexicon Valley</i></a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/slate-presents-lexicon-valley/id500673866?mt=2">iTunes</a>], Slate’s “podcast about language, from pet peeves, syntax, and etymology to neurolinguistics and the death of languages,” but the show turns out to take a broader view of the subject. I report this with great relief, having spent the past five years listening to foreign-language podcasts and broadening my own linguistic Weltanschauung thereby.<br>
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Still, I approach with trepidation any program dealing mainly with English, a language about whose usage enervated pedants have long since dominated the conversation. But enjoy the show though weenies may, non-weenies listen too. Co-host and producer Mike Vuolo usually reads a complimentary and/or linguistically interesting iTunes review at the top of each episode, one of which praised he and his partner Bob Garfield for their refusal to adhere to prescriptivism. Wallace wrote much about linguistic prescriptivists, “whose bemused irony often masks a Colonel Blimp's rage at the way the beloved English of their youth is being trashed in the decadent present”; for their counterparts, the descriptivists, according to Garner, “it’s impermissible to say that one form of language is any better than another: as long as a native speaker says it, it’s OK &mdash; and anyone who takes a contrary stand is a dunderhead.” So Vuolo and Garfield, on the whole, care more about language as humans actually use it than language as humans “ought to” use it, premising their conversations on the assumption that everything spoken, written, or grunted, no matter how casually, confusingly, or irritatingly, means something.<br>
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I’d long idly wondered, for instance, at the common yet seemingly nonsensical habit of modern English speakers to begin a reply with the words “yeah, no.” In <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/06/yeah_no_lexicon_valley_slate_podcast.html">an episode breaking down this very phenomenon</a>, Vuolo actually whips out a clip of Tim Burton at a screening Q&A, asked to explain the strange prevalence in his films of the name “Ed.” “Yeah, no,” the director admits, “I know.” Discussing a few television clips from Australia &mdash; land of “yeah, no,” apparently &mdash; and consulting the relevant literature, our co-hosts find that the odd phrase can function in several ways: as agreement with a negative statement, as strong agreement that removes any possibility of contradiction, as a hedge or softener, and as something called “the resumptive yeah-no.” Most episodes similarly use sound clips, and sometimes even interviews with the experts, to illustrate the linguistic subject under discussion, whether they come from Slate’s other podcasts or <i>Seinfeld</i> or even <i>Legally Blonde</i>. Vuolo marshals that last one in <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html">a discussion of “vocal fry,”</a> a creaky way of speaking used, as Garfield’s observations emphasize, mainly by young American women.<br>
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He actually took heat from a handful of listeners for that; evidently they sent in e-mails writing him off as a “sexist.” Personally, I often don’t start listening to someone until they <i>do</i> get accused of an -ism, and I’ve since paid closer attention to Garfield’s curious role on the show. Having referred to himself as the “bad cop,” he does indeed stake out the curmudgeonly position on many a language issue, if only for the purposes of devil’s advocacy. But what draws a man known primarily for writing about advertising and co-hosting <i>On the Media</i>, let alone one who admits he couldn’t even learn Spanish, to a podcast as specialized as this? He does a good job, certainly, but why does he do it? His tendency toward unreconstructedness does give me an idea for a <i>Lexicon Valley</i> episode I’d like to hear, though. The show, to my mind, covers not just the mechanics of language but the truths language reveal about us. So what can we learn about ourselves from the thirty-year prevalence of accusations of “sexism,” “racism” &mdash; for that matter, -isms of any sort? Some of the same lessons we’d learn by examining our seventeenth-century use of the word “heresy,” I suspect, but I’ll hold off with the guesses until Vuolo and Garfield get on the case.<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b> hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/06/30/podthoughts-colin-marshall-lexicon-valley#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 01 Jul 2013 00:13:22 +0000Colin Marshall32950 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: The Three Percent Podcasthttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/06/17/podthoughts-colin-marshall-three-percent-podcast
<center><img src="http://img.labnol.org/podcasts/three-percent-podcast.jpg" width=300 height=300></center><br>
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<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: two publishers talking books, and much else in the cultural space besides<br>
Episode duration: 40m-1h20m<br>
Frequency: 1-2 per month<br>
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Checking out any new bookstore, I head immediately to its world literature shelves. That is, I see if it has them at all. It usually doesn’t. Though small, the world literature shelf at Skylight Books here in Los Angeles so impresses me that, often, I don’t leave it for the entire visit. Not that I visit much anymore; shortly after moving to town, a broadcaster friend of mine &mdash; probably the best-known non-writing figure in the Los Angeles book world &mdash; called up Skylight and recommended they hire me, using some of the most gleamingly superlatively terms with which I will ever hear myself described. When I turned up to talk to the managers, they asked if I had a car, suggesting that maybe I could drive stuff around for events. I didn’t have a car. My applications to a few other such businesses met with the indifference of the universe. I did land an interview with one noted Pasadena bookstore, which proceeded to surround me with at least a dozen other, clammier applicants &mdash; supplicants, really &mdash; each more desperate than the last, and all more desperate than me, to convince the interviewers of their single-minded dedication to customer service.<br>
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That about sums up my contact with that side of the book business, though I do spend much of my time reading about books, writing about books, and interviewing the writers of books, especially books of the international variety. Hence my interest in <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/?s=tag&t=three-percent-podcast"><i>The Three Percent Podcast</i></a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-percent-podcast/id434696686?mt=2">iTunes</a>], the audio branch of <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/">Three Percent</a>, a site from the University of Rochester meant to provide “a destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature” (which constitutes three percent of the business). Podcast co-host Chad W. Post teaches at the University, runs Three Percent, and also direct’s Open Letter, the University’s own literary publishing house. They’ve put out a few cool-looking titles from the likes of Alejandro Zambra, Mathias Énard, and Marguerite Duras. Tom Roberge, the podcast’s other co-host, works as the Publicity and Marketing Director at the long-respected press New Directions, whose spine logo &mdash; a “colophon,” I think they call it &mdash; my eyes zip right toward when I scan those world-lit shelves. I trust that little stylized man and wolf. Having introduced before to writers like César Aira, Yoko Tawada, and Enrique Vila-Matas, they probably won’t steer me wrong now.<br>
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I remember meeting Roberge a few years back, at an Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. (I have nothing to do with any academic writing department, but I do get a fair few podcast interviews recorded there.) He sold me some books from New Directions’ table there at the conference’s book fair, and later mailed me a box of Aira’s work so I could <a href=http://colinmarshall.libsyn.com/who-is-c-sar-aira-translators-chris-andrews-katherine-silver-and-rosalie-knecht>do a radio show on the writer</a>. I seldom buy new books these days; it felt weird, almost wrong, to exchange actual money from the handful I picked up off the table. I do, however, get a lot of them sent to me by publishers. The rest I check out from my friendly local library. This may not bode well for the publishing industry, but then, if you listen to publishers, things haven’t tended to bode well for them a century or so. Roberge and Post, two publishers, do tend to get into the nuts and bolts of the business of publishing on most episodes of <i>Three Percent</i>, and this fascinates me, though I do often find myself surprised by what surprises them. On <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=6502">one episode</a>, Post, who teaches a class on publishing, sounded aghast as he described how his students think of the price of a book not as the price of a new book, but as the price of a used one, and as a used one on Amazon, no less. As a buyer of used books when I buy books at all, I can sympathize with the snot-nosed youngsters. Some of those new ones can cost, like, eighteen bucks! What do I have, oil wealth?<br>
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But they don’t always talk publishing, which I don’t think most readers will mind. Video gamers, say, thirst for news about the video game industry, but I suspect any given reader would die happy never again having to hear about thin profit margins, the complications of eBook digital rights management, or the latest wildly unappealing proposed alternative to the printed book. And these fellows don’t always talk books: <i>Three Percent</i> conversations weave all over the cultural space, from music to movies to sports, especially in the absence of a guest from the book world. A dubious prospect, you might think: who would want to hear a couple of “book guys” discuss whatever happens to come to mind? I may sound like an apologist for standard podcasting indiscipline, but hear me out: projects in this medium, experience has shown me, can more effectively be about everything than projects in most other media. I see the trick of it, especially for a podcast, as always <i>seeming</i> to be about just one thing. Only through ostensible specialization can a podcaster pull off actual generalism. So I do indeed want to hear Roberge and Post talk about everything, but to do it always through the lens of new literary fiction in translation, or to do it with segues from that subject so smooth and untraceable that I never even realize they went from Javier Marías to Eurovision or Quentin Tarantino or 45 minutes about their fantasy basketball leagues.<br>
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Come to think of it, I find that as true when reading as I do when listening: writing simply about one thing can never satisfy, nor can writing simply about everything. <i>The Three Percent Podcast</i> also has another lesson generalizable not just across podcasting, but across all forms of human communication. Virgil Thomson, as I recall, advised a young music critic never to make his personal opinion explicit, because “the words that you use to describe what you've heard will be the criticism.” I feel as if I’ve heard many, many of Roberge and Post’s personal opinions on the show, most of them strong and several surely worth noting, but I can’t for the life of me remember them. (I do seem to recall something about Malcolm Gladwell being The Enemy.) They might have made their way deeper into my mind had the conversations delivered them implicitly, rather than explicitly. I mean, jeez, after Podthinking for over five years now, I’ve heard guys sitting at microphones make many a judgment, when even my own opinions don’t interest me. But you know what does interest me? This English novelist by the name of Derek Raymond, whom either Roberge or Post mentioned offhand on one episode. I can’t remember whether they liked or disliked him, but they did say something about his having written thoroughly Thatcher-era crime stories. Sounds like a read to me.<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b> hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/06/17/podthoughts-colin-marshall-three-percent-podcast#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 17 Jun 2013 16:50:23 +0000Colin Marshall32928 at http://www.maximumfun.orgPodthoughts by Colin Marshall: Letter from Americahttp://www.maximumfun.org/2013/06/02/podthoughts-colin-marshall-letter-america
<center><img src="http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/podcasts/artwork/266/lfaearlyyrs.jpg"></center><br>
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<b>Vital stats:</b><br>
Format: letters on one Englishman’s America, from 1946 to 2004<br>
Episode duration: 15m<br>
Frequency: 1-2 per month<br>
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If you want to learn about a place, talk to its outsiders. That rule has guided my study of Los Angeles ever since I moved here; rightheaded or wrongheaded, observers with few roots in the city write the most interesting books about it, and reading them counteracts the risk of dulled senses that increases the longer I live here. On a larger scale, we Americans could do well to learn about our country through minds not quite of it. That, I would guess, explains the 170-year popularity of Alexis de Tocqueville’s <i>Democracy in America</i>. I haven’t read all of that book, but then, the astute reader can presumably pick and choose their chapters. The same goes for <i>Letter from America</i>, Alistair Cooke’s 2,869-episode radio series that ran from 1946 to 2004. Even if you don’t listen to the whole run, you’ll still learn a thing or two about the United States, and you may not have learned them any other way.<br>
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Not that you can, easily, listen to the whole run, though you can, thanks to the BBC’s podcasting wing, easily listen to select broadcasts from each of the program’s eras: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lfaearlyyrs">the early years</a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letter-from-america-early/id575214992?mt=2">iTunes</a>], <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lfanixoncarter">from Nixon to Carter</a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letter-from-america-from-nixon/id575214288?mt=2">iTunes</a>], <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lfaregan">the Reagan years</a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letter-from-america-reagan/id575215002?mt=2">iTunes</a>], <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lfabushsr">the Bush Sr. years</a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letter-from-america-bush-sr/id575214595?mt=2">iTunes</a>], <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lfaclinton">the Clinton years 1993-1996</a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letter-from-america-clinton/id575214885?mt=2">iTunes</a>], <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lfaclintonpt2">the Clinton years 1997-2000</a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letter-from-america-clinton/id575215331?mt=2">iTunes</a>], and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lfabushjr">the Bush Jr. years</a> [<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letter-from-america-bush-jr/id575214467?mt=2">iTunes</a>]. Don’t let the presidential organization throw you; the show hardly limits itself to political topics, though the British-born Cooke does seem to have had a lifelong fascination with American political figures and how the people regard them. No matter where you start listening &mdash; or, rather, when you start listening &mdash; you quickly get a sense of what fascinated Cooke, since, in all of <i>Letter from America</i>’s eight hundred-odd hours of airtime, he spoke, and he alone. Having emigrated to America in 1937, he wrote the letters from it, and by reading them over the BBC’s Home Service, succeeded by Radio 4, he sent them to an eager non-American listening public with almost as much curiosity about this relatively new, relatively experimental country as he had.<br>
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Not long into my own listening experience of the “American century” through Alistair Cooke’s eyes, I heard <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/lfaearlyyrs/lfaearlyyrs_19680609-2100d.mp3">his letter on the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy</a>. Cooke experienced this historical event in famously close proximity, having found his way into the Ambassador Hotel on that fateful 1968 night. I happened to listen to this firsthand account nearly 45 years after the time but in the grand scheme not far at all from the site, living as I do about a block from where the Ambassador once stood, and where now stands the vaguely Ambassador-shaped Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools. Such a moment certainly gives you a vivid glimpse of the compressed palimpsest of American history, and more came when I listened, while roaming the city, to Cooke’s other letters on Los Angeles-based happenings: the Watts riots, the 1992 riots, the O.J. Simpson verdict &mdash; and here I realize that most of them have to do with racial strife.<br>
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Cooke proved quite astute on such topics. He tracked the pendulum of propriety in ethnic labeling with a keenly disengaged eye &mdash; the term “oriental,” he points out with faint woe in several different decades, seems to have fallen out of favor &mdash; and, based in New York City, he kept close watch on the ever-shifting ingredient list of the American melting pot, or indeed, the question of whether the pot continued to melt at all. Born in Lancashire in 1908, Cook would at first seem a likely candidate for jerking-knee curmudgeonhood, especially as technology and diversity so intensified as he entered his seventies in the seventies, his eighties in the eighties, his nineties in the nineties. Yet, perhaps due to his status as a citizen but a cultural outsider, perhaps due to his thorough experience as a journalist of the old (as in, early twentieth-century) school, he remained throughout <i>Letter from America</i> refreshingly above the fray. Even in 2001, at the age of 92, <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/lfabushjr/lfabushjr_20010105-2100a.mp3">he considered the increasing purchases of Christmas gifts over the internet</a>. “I’m afraid that the yahoo, or philistine, reaction to these sorry stories will be a great sigh of relief, and the thought that the internet is really something of a fraud,” he says. “No need, yet, to abandon the shopping bag and the typewriter &mdash; or, in the case of some of my older friends, the quill pen.”<br>
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But he goes on: “Nothing could be more stupid. The dot-com failures that I have cited do not reflect any flaw in the institution of the internet, but in the human frailty of the people using it.” We thirty-ish-year-olds who grew up with the World Wide Web can appreciate the sobriety of Cooke’s perspective on such technological growing pains, or on <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/lfaclinton/lfaclinton_19991231-2100a.mp3">such non-events as Y2K</a>. I myself savored even more revisiting the historical events of my childhood &mdash; the <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/lfaregan/lfaregan_19860131-2100a.mp3">Challenger explosion</a>, the <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/lfabushsr/lfabushsr_19910111-2100a.mp3">collapse of Pan Am</a>, the <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/lfaclinton/lfaclinton_19940128-2100a.mp3">Lorena Bobbitt incident</a>, that whole O.J. thing, the “sad, squalid story” of <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/lfaclinton/lfaclinton_19940318-2100a.mp3">Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding</a> &mdash; finding in Cooke’s relation the disinterested but not uninterested clarity seemingly unavailable at the time from my parents’ generation, or even my grandparents’ generation. Perhaps these words really come straight from my instinctive worship of old Englishmen, but America needs another Alistair Cooke now. Until one surfaces, we’ll have to make do with these podcasts, from then &mdash; but at least we have a variety of thens to choose from, if only one Alistair Cooke.<br>
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[Podthinker <b>Colin Marshall</b> hosts and produces <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/"><i>Notebook on Cities and Culture</i></a> [<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notebook-on-cities-culture/id266539442">iTunes</a>] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/a-los-angeles-primer/"><i>A Los Angeles Primer</i></a>. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>.]http://www.maximumfun.org/2013/06/02/podthoughts-colin-marshall-letter-america#commentsColin MarshallPodthoughtsMon, 03 Jun 2013 04:35:27 +0000Colin Marshall32902 at http://www.maximumfun.org